Fragrances for Creating

Natural Perfumes, Incense, and Essential Oils

FOR AN INNER ENVIRONMENT CONDUCIVE TO CREATING

“God courts us with the beauty of this world.” — Hafiz

Scents

Marcel Proust dipped a Madeleine cookie into a cup of tea, and the taste took him back to his impressions of childhood. What this inspired him to write became the classic, seven-volume book, Remembrance of Things Past.

Scent, too, has an indelible effect on memory (if not more so than taste). It can call forth sensory and atmospheric details from your embodied imagination, or from your actual experience — whether from as recently as yesterday or lingering in far memory from so long ago that you could never make it surface on command. For this, a subtler approach is needed. Beautiful scents offer one time-tested way to evoke the details that make writing come to life and give your work a subtle-but-powerful influence in the world.

In addition, anointing yourself with a beautiful scent before writing can bring you quickly into a state of deep, full inner attention to give to your writing. Gone are the to-do lists, the pressing chores, and more. There is only this moment in which to enter the healing depths of your life, from which to draw forth the good medicine — this beautiful, fragrant moment.

This fragrance, then, permeates your writing. During the "product" phase of your book (publication, marketing, promotion, etc.), the fragrance may go into hiatus. But as soon as your book's cover is opened by a reader about to enter the world you have brought forth on the pages, the perfume of your writing begins to waft outwards and upwards. And now, the fragrance of your words, and the atmosphere you have created in your writing, touches your readers. The experience — and the fragrant blessing — is complete.

Rose Press is delighted to offer some of the best scents known to Naomi Rose's olfaction. Madini Perfumes, created from centuries-old recipes in a Moroccan Sufi tradition . . . The Mother's Incense, made of natural ingredients and intended to bring forth desirable qualities — these and other curated scents can serve you as you open to your deeper Self in your writing (or any other creative medium, as well).

Just keep in mind that — as with writing from the deeper Self — the beauty of these fragrances does not happen without you. Yours is the olfactory equipment (i.e., sense of smell) that receives this vaporous atmosphere. And in the case of perfumes and essential oils, your own body chemistry interacts with these alchemical substances to produce the scent. So when you use them, if you like the scent you are wearing or blessing your writing-room with, know that it couldn't happen without you. Just like the healing within your writing, and — for readers — the alchemical experience of reading books written in this way.

Words by themselves can feel remote, abstract, something to pull out of thin air. But when we are able to be deeply and intimately present with ourselves as we write, the words may open up to us and court us, give themselves to us as companions and friends born out of our in-the-moment felt and realized experience.

And what better to bring us in touch than beautiful fragrances (smell being the sense most connected with the limbic system, sensory receptivity, and memory.

The scents in this Rose Press Enhancements for Writers Collection have been especially curated to open up wonderful, receptive capacities and qualities in you.

From Sufi perfumes whose recipes have been crafted over many generations . . . to natural incenses designed, dipped, and blessed to bring out the best in its users . . . the interaction between these olfactory openers-of-inspiration and you make it possible for you to write from a place of sensory- and heart-connection that thinking alone simply can’t reach.

Whether you wish to write fiction or nonfiction, or anything in between, these beautifully evocative scents will help the descriptive aspect of your writing to flower, pleasing you with the realization of what you are capable of.